BANGALORE, INDIA: Remember how COBOL programs were written in the past? Well, it was real pain as the interface was not as user-friendly as the new IDEs that are available for various languages. However, at a later stage, the re-engineering process began for COBOL because development on the language had achieved its saturation.

The optimization of the code began to gain traction which made it even more difficult for developers to work on. Also debugging the application on a mainframe was costlier and there was need for a solution.

The Microfocus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition provides mainframe development environment for developers with the added benefit of reduced costs and risks. Today, organizations are looking at building and deploying an application in a short period of time.

Also, as rewriting the application for a new platform is much costlier, this solution helps in reusing the existing application code, skills and assets in a simple and cost effective way. This also helps you to deliver the application over multiple channels, for example online. Take an example of a typical banking environment where the backend is running on legacy systems. And suppose they want to introduce a new featue that helps users to know their loan balance.

For this, they had to build applications in an interface that was not graphical, and then for testing they used mainframes which made the task costlier. Executing the application on a mainframe is far costlier than executing on workstations as mainframes charge on MIPS.

Using this tool, one can create or optimize applications and run mainframe-based applications with ease as there is inbuilt emulator for mainframes. The emulators provided with this application are CICS, IMS, DB2 and Assembler. Also, after this application has been deployed, exporting a program to a mainframe is as simple as drag and drop.

To overcome this challenge, MFEEE provides a very easy and effective environment to take up the legacy application and analyze or re-engineer it. It provides full support for all phases of a typical mainframe application such as design and generation, through analysis, development, compilation, debugging, testing and deployment, which makes the tasks easy as developers don't need to switch workstations for each phase.